The evolution of information technology into the central nervous system of the modern enterprise has dramatically changed the amount of digital information generated and stored by today's business ventures. Personal productivity applications such as spreadsheets, word processors, presentation software, and personal database programs have driven personal computers (PCs) to include gigabytes of storage. E-mail has become a core business communication tool and the worldwide e-mailbox count is presently estimated to exceed one billion. Both e-mail volume and e-mail attachment size and volume continue to increase dramatically. At the same time department and workgroup collaborative applications combined with Web and customer-facing have resulted in the generation of terabytes of data. The full impact of multimedia digitization of books, audio, and video may yet be realized.
As a result, the mission critical nature of an enterprise's digital information (data) has increased. Data is now often viewed as the life blood of the enterprise since any disruption in electronic data flow can destroy an enterprise's ability to function. Current industry estimates suggest an enterprise that experiences a disruption in data access lasting more than 10 days may never fully recover financially, and that 50% of those may be out of business within 5 years. Therefore, data storage is often now viewed as a critical business function and maintaining its availability, integrity, and security is a matter of survival for enterprises today.
This new position of electronic data as a core mission critical asset is creating new challenges in information and data storage management. New innovations in storage management have enabled the replacement of traditional direct-attached storage systems with centralized storage networks. In a centralized storage network environment, documents and other data are stored in a central file system owned, controlled, or directly managed by the enterprise, or by a contracted outsourcing organization. A storage management system is accessed via a private network such as a local area network (LAN) or a restricted subset of public network technology such as an Intranet or a virtual private network (VPN). Typical enterprise storage management systems provide techniques to index documents by document categories and keywords, plain-language names, document numbers and/or entered attributes. Index based searching capabilities are typically provided, also.
Centralized storage networks can allow storage devices to be decoupled from specific hardware and managed as a centralized resource pool. Virtually any server can have access to any and all of the storage capacity, allowing available storage to be allocated to the point of need. Both scalability and flexibility may be increased, and growing needs for storage can be met by adding more capacity to a storage pool instead of individual point servers.
However, while data storage networks may enable improved efficiencies and scalabilities of storage hardware, the complexities of managing storage networks may increase dramatically. Problems that arise can be extremely complex and difficult to solve, and typically require an enterprise to have access to highly skilled and specialized technicians. As a result, data storage system administration can represent a substantial portion of an enterprise's information technology (IT) budget. Moreover, data storage system problems and disruptions may severely impact business continuity.
As a result, many enterprises are viewing data storage management skills as a required core competency. However, they are finding it difficult and expensive to train, maintain, and retain in-house expertise. The infrequency of problems within any one firm may make it difficult for one firm to maintain freshness in the problem resolution skills of an internally captive staff. Reducing costs by assigning these individuals to other tasks may further dilute skill focus and can cause employee retention problems. The particular selection of vendor tools and products made by any one firm may also limit internal staffing exposure to new and emerging trends.
Vendors in the data storage management industry are pursuing proprietary approaches as a competitive tool to lock customers into vendor products. There currently may be no fully integrated tools that take a multi-vendor and system wide perspective. Firms may currently use a variety of multi-vendor tools and techniques to manage and troubleshoot their data storage systems. Unfortunately, this can add cost and complexity to data storage management. Accordingly, there is a need for improved, lower cost ways of managing data storage management systems.
In recent years, Internet-enabled data storage providers have begun to provide remote data storage for businesses or individuals that cannot afford or who may not need enterprise data management solutions. These companies may take the functionality of personal computer file systems, such as Microsoft's Windows Explorer, to the Internet. Their focus is on the individual consumer and small project teams and may not consider an organization's need to securely manage large volumes or information in customized manners. As data are transmitted over a public data network (e.g., the Internet), security of the data can be compromised. The data can be intercepted, read and/or tampered with in such a manner as to reduce the value of the data. Data residing on hosted Internet-provided file storage systems can be compromised by unauthorized access to that data by personnel nominally responsible for only managing and maintaining the storage of the data.
Increasingly, individuals and small businesses (referred to as “small office, home office” or SOHO) are seeking data storage services. Unfortunately, heretofore, providers of data storage services have not targeted individual and SOHO clients because of the amount of time necessary to initiate data storage services. Moreover, the time required on behalf of individual and SOHO clients to subscribe to data storage services is not insubstantial. For example, currently it may require about thirty to forty minutes of time by an end user and two to three hours of time for a supplier of data storage services to initiate data storage services. The time, complexity and overhead has limited the availability of data storage services to a large segment of the market.
Accordingly, there is a need for lessening the complexity and/or decreasing the time required to subscribe to data storage services.